Angel (I) (2018) User Reviews

The gamut of human emotions all the way from A to B.

[ansell-72879 · 3/10 · 23 July 2021]

What's good about Angel? The picture quality is excellent. Locations are, in the main, interesting. The musical score is relevant and interesting. The plot premise could, under other circumstances, be passable. And, well, that's about it.

What's not so good about Angel? The cast. I'm certain that they gave it their all but the cast are uniformly inept. Everything from blocking, where the actors stand in a scene, to line delivery has student project written all over it. (Blocking is, admittedly, the directors job.)

Angel does establish a benchmark of sorts for politeness. Actors repeatedly and courteously wait for each other to finish lines before delivering their own. This leaves awkward silences scattered throughout the films 97 minutes.

The acting is stilted, very self-conscious, and so the characters unbelievable. Some cast members are better than other, Bradley A. Myers, might develop but he will need to avoid these types of films.

Even so, and as Dorothy Parker was said to observe of Katherine Hepburn, the entire cast generally run the full gamut of human emotions all the way from A to B.

The plot? After a massacre the remaining residents of the gentle town of Raven Rock pack-up and leave. Despite the abandoned town being securely locked random people start disappearing within its confines. A journalist and her friends investigate the disappearances. Written by Cheyenne Gordon and Tory Jones there is enough meat in this for a much better film.

Without giving too much away, there is a monster; a cheaply costumed, clumsy, and generally regrettable monster.

Tory Jones, the director has a bit of history in micro-budget genre films and has earned applause for some efforts. Angel is not an applaudable film. This project was crowd funded. The same cast and crew were in another Tory Jones Indy, The Wicked One, in 2017. It is a marginally better film with a not dissimilar plot. The point is, Jones et al can do it! Make a credible'ish' film that is. This makes Angel just that bit more disappointing.

Terrible

[africe · 2/10 · 9 August 2020]

This movie was in need of a lot of help. The premise was good but the acting was HORRIBLE!!!! The stupidity factor was the highest possible. These kids need acting lessons immediately!! I gave it a 2 for the premise.

Typical B-Rated "Horror" Movie

[tiffanytallent1981 · 4/10 · 9 June 2021]

A young girl (Ava) gets kidnapped off of her property by a strange man. He forces her into underground tunnels that lead to another town. After they get there, some THING pulls the kidnapper into a room and apparently kills him. We don't know for sure because all we hear is the girl scream. We find out later that numerous people have disappeared in this abandoned town over the decades. About a year passes since the girl went missing and her dad hires a group of five investigative journalists to find out what could've happened. Apparently, the local cops didn't do an adequate search of the town before that. Anyway, the dad also provides a military guy as a bodyguard, should they need protection. And the journalism crew hired a woman (Mya) who used to live in the town as a child, to guide them.

During the first night, the security guy is dragged out of his tent by some THING. The next morning, the group explores the town without him. One journalist stays at base camp in case he returns. Instead, the security guy manages to make it back to the dad's house. He dies there and for some crazy reason the dad doesn't call the cops. If he had, many lives would've been saved later. So now there are only six people exploring the town.

Mya starts to remember things from when she was a child there. She believes that the killer is the daughter of a woman who executed by the townspeople 30 years ago, for murder. Everyone else is skeptical because how could a little girl live alone for years? But apparently she's right. And one by one, the journalists are killed off, leaving only Mya and Piper. The dad and a friend finally enter the town just in time to save the women. This is where it becomes even more ridiculous and I actually did laugh out loud. I thought the dad seemed creepy throughout the movie. Well, I was right. He ends up drugging Mya and Piper and taking them BACK to the town!!! He wants to use them as bait so he can kill the monster who killed Ava. A lot of fake fighting happens and surprise, surprise, guess who is alive? Ava!! The dad dies. The monster dies. And then FINALLY, the cops arrive with an ambulance. Piper's boss (who was not with them) did what the dad should've done in the beginning-called for help!!!

This movie isn't the worst B-rated movie I've watched, but it's close. Like most of these, the acting was poor and seemingly right out of drama school. Some were better than others, but not by much. The choices the characters made throughout were also ridiculous. Yes, let's go into the creepy mine, even though a killer is after us. And sure, I'll chase the knife wielding murderer through the dark woods, by myself. Then, the killing and fight scenes are laughable. You can tell it's fake and actually hear the sound track at times. And WHAT exactly happened to Ava? The killer just kept her as a pet for a year? Now she's a perfectly fine orphan. Oh well, at least some characters lived at the end of this one.

Was this meant to be corny and bad?

[zoieverett · 1/10 · 11 February 2021]

From the get go I could tell it was going to be a low budget film, but decided to keep going as some low budget movies can surprise you... And that it did! It surprised me how comical it was!! I could not stop laughing at how bad the acting was, was to dramatic. The fight scenes in the last half hour of the movie were some of the worst I've ever seen! There was no way that you could have missed that when editing the movie. You can clearly see they weren't hitting each other at all and there was no sounds when they hit each other. I could not stop laughing, it was the worst horror movie I've ever seen and horror is my favourite genre. If you're looking for a movie that is so terrible that it's funny, definitely watch it. Oh and I read some of the reviews by horror buffs and I'm confused at whether or not we are talking about the same movie... Because this was terrible, nothing stood out to me as being great about any of it.

Major disappointment

[astro_boy_gc · 1/10 · 13 June 2021]

This film could have been amazing if it had more detail. Sadly the actor's couldn't act and "Angel" was just a girl who grow up without a mother due to her mother being murdered , there were multiple scenes with the actors could've killed the villain "Angel" but they just ran, I think it could have been great but most likely due to the budget being so low the film just couldn't move forward.

They Tried

[icocleric · 2/10 · 18 December 2023]

It was kind of horrible, the acting especially was some of the worst I've seen. The premise started off okay, but the longer the film went on the more it made no sense, and it turned into a bit of a mess plot wise. It tried to add too much. I think it could have been a lot better with some editing. Some of the lines in the script was awful.

The picture quality, and location was nice though. Nothing wrong with the sound quality either.

The music was so corny and repetitive to the point it was annoying. I think it also got rid of any tension the film could have had. It didn't even feel like a horror film.

Worthless no-budgeter

[blerpnor · 1/10 · 11 July 2022]

At least I only paid a little over a buck for this. Often, the acting in these zero-budget horror pieces is better than the writing, but not in this case. Bad writing, dreadful acting, and a snooze-worthy pace, besides. In fact, I dozed off toward the end, waking up in time to see the father fighting the... creature? Monster? Ghost? Ghoul? And why was everyone so rude to another, and couldn't the dialogue have depended less on the F-bomb? "Jesus (bleep)ing Christ" gets old in a hurry, though I suppose such language is perceived as... edgy? Realistic? Do the script supervisors on these things tell the writers, "Okay, we have next to no budget, so insert a lot of profanity to compensate." It's as if the goal is to emphasize the lack of budget, acting talent, and story substance. If so, "Angel" is a model of its type. Too bad this thing isn't dreadful in a LOL way.

Pretty decent slasher flick

[Woodyanders · 7/10 · 23 February 2022]

Wealthy contractor Benjamin Weaver (a solid performance by Dale Miller) hires a team of investigative journalists to research the history on the abandoned town of Raven Rock after Weaver's daughter goes missing. The team wind up running afoul of masked psycho Angel (a creepy portrayal by Jessica Bloom).

Writer/director Tory Jones relates the familiar, but still enjoyable and engrossing story at a constant pace, generates a fair amount of tension and spooky atmosphere, takes time to develop the characters, and makes good use of the rural backwoods locations. Moreover, Jones deserves extra points for showing people breaking down and crying when they're exposed to brutal violence. However, Jones alas skimps on the gore and the score is often overbearing. So overall nothing special, but a nice little slice'n'dice item just the same.